Occassionally when I'm reading up a bit on how law school classes are, I'll see a comment about how some professors teach more theory-based law (versus what someone said was "black letter law"). There was also a comment I came across about how many seemed to think that the "top" law schools in the U.S. teach more from a theory-based perspective and that the "lower" ranked law schools more often focused on the black letter side.

Just curious if this stereotype holds true at your respective schools and also perhaps if anyone can elaborate more on the two styles and if one prepares you more for actually practicing as a lawyer?

I think there is solid merit in teaching theory, and then supplement it with practicum. Practicum, not black letter rules. What is discovery, why do we have it, and how can I use it to best benefit my client? I can figure out the specific rules for it on my own time.

From the perspective of a 0L (so this, in particular, should be taken with a grain of salt), HYS have the stereotype of being more "theory" based and less "practice" based (were you to draw a continuum) than everybody else. Yale in particular is often singled out as a school that offers many courses that might pique your intellectual interest but have absolutely no possible real-world application (this feeds into the "ivory tower" stereotype). It's also been rumored that UChi, UVA, and NU are the most "practical" of the T14, even though that group is, on average, more "theoretical" than non-T14.

It might be better if the T14 schools offered more clinical training. Indeed, a lot in the legal community have called on schools to do that, because they're getting tired of graduates knowing literally almost nothing about how to actually practice law. But that isn't going to change any time soon. The curriculum is designed by people who either voluntary left private practice or never went into it--i.e. the people LEAST likely to give a shit about whether the material has any practical application. You'll note, as you go through your legal career, that you will have many professors who have never actually done the thing their course would supposedly prepare you to do. It may frustrate you that, for example, you might very well learn Administrative Law from someone who has never actually filed a brief on a regulatory case. C'est la vie. Schools have no incentive to teach you practical material, seeing as you can't opt out like an MBA could (e.g. you don't need an MBA to work in business, but you need a J.D. to practice law), which means they can afford to teach you whatever the hell they feel like teaching you. Maybe 90% of law students would prefer to learn "practical" things instead of "academic" things, but the other 10% are the ones that go into academia and therefore have total power on what to teach the next generation. More succinctly: Anyone who could possibly teach you something useful is too busy out in the real world actually doing something useful.

Even non-HYS graduates say that out of three years, they learned maybe a semester's worth of actually useful knowledge at most. But, as has been noted, it doesn't really matter, and it would be silly to pick a law school based on your perception of how theoretical it is. Law school is more a signalling device than a training center. Being top of your class doesn't show you know more about how to practice law, but it shows you're probably better than your peers at figuring out an adequate solution to a given problem--and that's the skill that firms value more than anything else.

If T14 schools just prepared you for the bar, that might be a better use of your time rather than sitting through a Con Law class full of information you are almost guaranteed to never utilize. But even if teaching to the bar is more useful, it's a bad sign if your school actually does it--it means you a go to a school that worries its graduates won't pass the bar without help. T14 schools, on the other hand, don't give a shit about teaching to the bar, because their graduates are smart enough to pass it at a high clip. The "theoretical" schools (the T14 generally, HYS in particular) are the ones that, ironically, do the most practical thing: actually get you a good job. That matters way more than your perception of a school's teaching style.

Quick counter: those who understand how the law operates will be better lawyers than those that can learn black letter law. Lawyers have plenty of time to find what the law is, but figuring out how to use it to their advantage is what makes lawyers valuable.

Monochromatic Oeuvre wrote:From the perspective of a 0L (so this, in particular, should be taken with a grain of salt), HYS have the stereotype of being more "theory" based and less "practice" based (were you to draw a continuum) than everybody else. Yale in particular is often singled out as a school that offers many courses that might pique your intellectual interest but have absolutely no possible real-world application (this feeds into the "ivory tower" stereotype). It's also been rumored that UChi, UVA, and NU are the most "practical" of the T14, even though that group is, on average, more "theoretical" than non-T14.

It might be better if the T14 schools offered more clinical training. Indeed, a lot in the legal community have called on schools to do that, because they're getting tired of graduates knowing literally almost nothing about how to actually practice law. But that isn't going to change any time soon. The curriculum is designed by people who either voluntary left private practice or never went into it--i.e. the people LEAST likely to give a shit about whether the material has any practical application. You'll note, as you go through your legal career, that you will have many professors who have never actually done the thing their course would supposedly prepare you to do. It may frustrate you that, for example, you might very well learn Administrative Law from someone who has never actually filed a brief on a regulatory case. C'est la vie. Schools have no incentive to teach you practical material, seeing as you can't opt out like an MBA could (e.g. you don't need an MBA to work in business, but you need a J.D. to practice law), which means they can afford to teach you whatever the hell they feel like teaching you. Maybe 90% of law students would prefer to learn "practical" things instead of "academic" things, but the other 10% are the ones that go into academia and therefore have total power on what to teach the next generation. More succinctly: Anyone who could possibly teach you something useful is too busy out in the real world actually doing something useful.

Even non-HYS graduates say that out of three years, they learned maybe a semester's worth of actually useful knowledge at most. But, as has been noted, it doesn't really matter, and it would be silly to pick a law school based on your perception of how theoretical it is. Law school is more a signalling device than a training center. Being top of your class doesn't show you know more about how to practice law, but it shows you're probably better than your peers at figuring out an adequate solution to a given problem--and that's the skill that firms value more than anything else.

If T14 schools just prepared you for the bar, that might be a better use of your time rather than sitting through a Con Law class full of information you are almost guaranteed to never utilize. But even if teaching to the bar is more useful, it's a bad sign if your school actually does it--it means you a go to a school that worries its graduates won't pass the bar without help. T14 schools, on the other hand, don't give a shit about teaching to the bar, because their graduates are smart enough to pass it at a high clip. The "theoretical" schools (the T14 generally, HYS in particular) are the ones that, ironically, do the most practical thing: actually get you a good job. That matters way more than your perception of a school's teaching style.

Monochromatic Oeuvre wrote:From the perspective of a 0L (so this, in particular, should be taken with a grain of salt), HYS have the stereotype of being more "theory" based and less "practice" based (were you to draw a continuum) than everybody else. Yale in particular is often singled out as a school that offers many courses that might pique your intellectual interest but have absolutely no possible real-world application (this feeds into the "ivory tower" stereotype). It's also been rumored that UChi, UVA, and NU are the most "practical" of the T14, even though that group is, on average, more "theoretical" than non-T14.

It might be better if the T14 schools offered more clinical training. Indeed, a lot in the legal community have called on schools to do that, because they're getting tired of graduates knowing literally almost nothing about how to actually practice law. But that isn't going to change any time soon. The curriculum is designed by people who either voluntary left private practice or never went into it--i.e. the people LEAST likely to give a shit about whether the material has any practical application. You'll note, as you go through your legal career, that you will have many professors who have never actually done the thing their course would supposedly prepare you to do. It may frustrate you that, for example, you might very well learn Administrative Law from someone who has never actually filed a brief on a regulatory case. C'est la vie. Schools have no incentive to teach you practical material, seeing as you can't opt out like an MBA could (e.g. you don't need an MBA to work in business, but you need a J.D. to practice law), which means they can afford to teach you whatever the hell they feel like teaching you. Maybe 90% of law students would prefer to learn "practical" things instead of "academic" things, but the other 10% are the ones that go into academia and therefore have total power on what to teach the next generation. More succinctly: Anyone who could possibly teach you something useful is too busy out in the real world actually doing something useful.

Even non-HYS graduates say that out of three years, they learned maybe a semester's worth of actually useful knowledge at most. But, as has been noted, it doesn't really matter, and it would be silly to pick a law school based on your perception of how theoretical it is. Law school is more a signalling device than a training center. Being top of your class doesn't show you know more about how to practice law, but it shows you're probably better than your peers at figuring out an adequate solution to a given problem--and that's the skill that firms value more than anything else.

If T14 schools just prepared you for the bar, that might be a better use of your time rather than sitting through a Con Law class full of information you are almost guaranteed to never utilize. But even if teaching to the bar is more useful, it's a bad sign if your school actually does it--it means you a go to a school that worries its graduates won't pass the bar without help. T14 schools, on the other hand, don't give a shit about teaching to the bar, because their graduates are smart enough to pass it at a high clip. The "theoretical" schools (the T14 generally, HYS in particular) are the ones that, ironically, do the most practical thing: actually get you a good job. That matters way more than your perception of a school's teaching style.

To read this post is to know what it might be like for a blind person to tell you what green sounds like. I would say it was wrong, but that implies it ever managed to speak adequately to some aspect of reality about which it could be false.

Monochromatic Oeuvre wrote:From the perspective of a 0L (so this, in particular, should be taken with a grain of salt)

You'll note, as you go through your legal career, that you will have many professors who have never actually done the thing their course would supposedly prepare you to do. It may frustrate you that, for example, you might very well learn Administrative Law from someone who has never actually filed a brief on a regulatory case. C'est la vie.

It might be a good idea for you to take a single law school course before you tell everyone else what to expect as they "go through [their] legal career[s]" At my T14, of my 8 professors 1L year, only 1 didn't actually practice what he taught and that's because he taught Con Law.

There is no such thing as legal "theory." And if there is, no law school teaches it. Law school teaches you how to sort through hundreds of pages of painstakingly dense and poor BS writing to identify the two or three sentences that are actually important and create rules. Chances are you already knew how to do this before law school even started.

The law is just glorified common sense in an area of study that lacks an element of empirical validation--allowing some nonsensical views to slip through and masquerade themselves as "rational thinking" simply because a judge happened to use a certain logical path, however poor it actually is, and the decision was not appealed/appealable, or the appeals court is equally dumb/too lazy to overturn it. The big problem is that there's no real way to measure whether one legal idea is better than another, so the whole process is kind of arbitrary.

There is no actual "legal method." Legal thinking is basically: 1) come up with any idea that looks superficially rational (but perhaps is not), 2) if judges think it sounds cool, it becomes law.

And if there actually is someone out there that is claiming that law school teaches you "theory" or "method" or to "think like a lawyer," they are either 1) a legal educator trying to justify the massive extraction of your future income that they are about to claim, or 2) a law school student trying to mentally blockade the depressing reality that they just dropped $250K for something that was entirely worthless beyond a school's ability to place people into jobs through OCI.

The only reason to pay for law school and go through this mess is that the legal education industry is a large "pay to play" shakedown. You pay to access better OCI programs, which is the only way to get a decent legal job straight out of school. Outside of OCI, there is zero reason to pay for any law school at all. In fact, I highly recommend moving to California and getting like a 30-hour a week job, reading for the bar, and bypassing the entire law school process completely. If you have good enough stats to make it into a top law school, chances are you'll succeed anyway in the field of law, and if you read for the bar, you're avoiding all the debt/stress/stupidity that goes along with getting a "legal education."

JCougar wrote:And if there actually is someone out there that is claiming that law school teaches you "theory" or "method" or to "think like a lawyer," they are either 1) a legal educator trying to justify the massive extraction of your future income that they are about to claim, or 2) a law school student trying to mentally blockade the depressing reality that they just dropped $250K for something that was entirely worthless beyond a school's ability to place people into jobs through OCI.

The only reason to pay for law school and go through this mess is that the legal education industry is a large "pay to play" shakedown. You pay to access better OCI programs, which is the only way to get a decent legal job straight out of school. Outside of OCI, there is zero reason to pay for any law school at all. In fact, I highly recommend moving to California and getting like a 30-hour a week job, reading for the bar, and bypassing the entire law school process completely. If you have good enough stats to make it into a top law school, chances are you'll succeed anyway in the field of law, and if you read for the bar, you're avoiding all the debt/stress/stupidity that goes along with getting a "legal education."

Why are you on this forum, and why do you have so many posts on this forum?

"Reading the law" in California is not a plausible choice for most people. Maybe I am not familiar with your posts, and am missing an obvious troll.

Why are you on this forum, and why do you have so many posts on this forum?

"Reading the law" in California is not a plausible choice for most people. Maybe I am not familiar with your posts, and am missing an obvious troll.

Because I went through law school already. It doesn't matter which law school you go to. The curriculum is basically the same. It's all equally a waste of time. Just get through it with the least debt possible. All the "prestige" you see as an 0L is fake. It's expensive, impractical bullshit. If you can't read for the bar in your own state, start asking your state senators and representatives to pass a law allowing you to bypass law school.

What you're saying could be applied to 90% of higher education. You're "paying to play" with a college education, because you can't get good jobs out of high school anymore. Almost anyone who is driven and intelligent could attain a better level of education than college, or a lot of higher education, provides in four years. In many ways it's just a sorting hat. That doesn't mean that you don't receive an education, but I feel that a lot of people understand that a degree of any kind is a form of validation or certification.

Your advice is basically useless; it's obvious that you're bitter. It's too bad that you didn't use your own "superior intellect" to put yourself in a better situation, but then I'm sure you'll just blame it on the big bad legal education system that hoodwinked you - what does that say about you?

To be honest, a lot of the folks that consistently attack legal education as a money shakedown scam use the same kind of logic that conspiracy theorists use to say that the United States attacked itself on 9/11.

Most top law schools make their money off alumni donations. Heck, in a lot of ways a Dean's number one job is "shaking down" alumni, not shaking down current students.

Regardless, I think the real difference between "top schools" and "regional schools" is that top schools can't just teach to a particular jurisdiction. So, you're going to be taught torts from a broader lens than say if you went to a school that places all of its students in a single jurisdiction where they can teach them specifically how torts are applied in that jurisdiction. I think this holds true for a lot of places.

JCougar wrote:And if there actually is someone out there that is claiming that law school teaches you "theory" or "method" or to "think like a lawyer," they are either 1) a legal educator trying to justify the massive extraction of your future income that they are about to claim, or 2) a law school student trying to mentally blockade the depressing reality that they just dropped $250K for something that was entirely worthless beyond a school's ability to place people into jobs through OCI.

The only reason to pay for law school and go through this mess is that the legal education industry is a large "pay to play" shakedown. You pay to access better OCI programs, which is the only way to get a decent legal job straight out of school. Outside of OCI, there is zero reason to pay for any law school at all. In fact, I highly recommend moving to California and getting like a 30-hour a week job, reading for the bar, and bypassing the entire law school process completely. If you have good enough stats to make it into a top law school, chances are you'll succeed anyway in the field of law, and if you read for the bar, you're avoiding all the debt/stress/stupidity that goes along with getting a "legal education."

Why are you on this forum, and why do you have so many posts on this forum?

"Reading the law" in California is not a plausible choice for most people. Maybe I am not familiar with your posts, and am missing an obvious troll.

JCougar wrote:And if there actually is someone out there that is claiming that law school teaches you "theory" or "method" or to "think like a lawyer," they are either 1) a legal educator trying to justify the massive extraction of your future income that they are about to claim, or 2) a law school student trying to mentally blockade the depressing reality that they just dropped $250K for something that was entirely worthless beyond a school's ability to place people into jobs through OCI.

The only reason to pay for law school and go through this mess is that the legal education industry is a large "pay to play" shakedown. You pay to access better OCI programs, which is the only way to get a decent legal job straight out of school. Outside of OCI, there is zero reason to pay for any law school at all. In fact, I highly recommend moving to California and getting like a 30-hour a week job, reading for the bar, and bypassing the entire law school process completely. If you have good enough stats to make it into a top law school, chances are you'll succeed anyway in the field of law, and if you read for the bar, you're avoiding all the debt/stress/stupidity that goes along with getting a "legal education."

Why are you on this forum, and why do you have so many posts on this forum?

"Reading the law" in California is not a plausible choice for most people. Maybe I am not familiar with your posts, and am missing an obvious troll.

Wustlin did not turn out so great for JCougar.

UVA won't turn out so great for a lot of people either, so I don't see your point really

JCougar wrote:And if there actually is someone out there that is claiming that law school teaches you "theory" or "method" or to "think like a lawyer," they are either 1) a legal educator trying to justify the massive extraction of your future income that they are about to claim, or 2) a law school student trying to mentally blockade the depressing reality that they just dropped $250K for something that was entirely worthless beyond a school's ability to place people into jobs through OCI.

The only reason to pay for law school and go through this mess is that the legal education industry is a large "pay to play" shakedown. You pay to access better OCI programs, which is the only way to get a decent legal job straight out of school. Outside of OCI, there is zero reason to pay for any law school at all. In fact, I highly recommend moving to California and getting like a 30-hour a week job, reading for the bar, and bypassing the entire law school process completely. If you have good enough stats to make it into a top law school, chances are you'll succeed anyway in the field of law, and if you read for the bar, you're avoiding all the debt/stress/stupidity that goes along with getting a "legal education."

Why are you on this forum, and why do you have so many posts on this forum?

"Reading the law" in California is not a plausible choice for most people. Maybe I am not familiar with your posts, and am missing an obvious troll.

Wustlin did not turn out so great for JCougar.

UVA won't turn out so great for a lot of people either, so I don't see your point really

JCougar wrote:And if there actually is someone out there that is claiming that law school teaches you "theory" or "method" or to "think like a lawyer," they are either 1) a legal educator trying to justify the massive extraction of your future income that they are about to claim, or 2) a law school student trying to mentally blockade the depressing reality that they just dropped $250K for something that was entirely worthless beyond a school's ability to place people into jobs through OCI.

The only reason to pay for law school and go through this mess is that the legal education industry is a large "pay to play" shakedown. You pay to access better OCI programs, which is the only way to get a decent legal job straight out of school. Outside of OCI, there is zero reason to pay for any law school at all. In fact, I highly recommend moving to California and getting like a 30-hour a week job, reading for the bar, and bypassing the entire law school process completely. If you have good enough stats to make it into a top law school, chances are you'll succeed anyway in the field of law, and if you read for the bar, you're avoiding all the debt/stress/stupidity that goes along with getting a "legal education."

Why are you on this forum, and why do you have so many posts on this forum?

"Reading the law" in California is not a plausible choice for most people. Maybe I am not familiar with your posts, and am missing an obvious troll.

Wustlin did not turn out so great for JCougar.

UVA won't turn out so great for a lot of people either, so I don't see your point really

That wasn't the point. More pointing to the fact that JCougar can be a complete troll when it comes things and that's because law school hasn't turned out to be such a great choice for him or her. And guess what, law school has turned out to be the wrong choice for people from HYS down. For all I know I could be an embittered individual in 4-5 years, only time will tell.

If I could make a cool Vandying reference for you I probably would. People are dicks on the internet.

UVAIce wrote:To be honest, a lot of the folks that consistently attack legal education as a money shakedown scam use the same kind of logic that conspiracy theorists use to say that the United States attacked itself on 9/11.

LOL. This is exactly the kind of thinking I was talking about. This is what I call "legal industry" logic.

In fact, your entire post employs nothing but ad hominem attacks and false appeals to my motive. Nowhere do you attempt to rebut my central premise that law school fails to teach you anything yet still costs a fortune.

Also, you have little idea about either my desired or my actual outcome of the law school process, outside of the fact that I think the process itself is vacuous bullshit.

Maybe I went to law school in part for intellectual development purposes, and found that the stuff I did on my own time on the side was 50 times more educational and fulfilling than the time I spent in class. That's actually not very hard to believe. Virtually nobody that goes through the law school process thinks it's worth their time. It's not like I'm saying anything new here.

Last edited by JCougar on Sun Jun 30, 2013 4:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

UVAIce wrote:To be honest, a lot of the folks that consistently attack legal education as a money shakedown scam use the same kind of logic that conspiracy theorists use to say that the United States attacked itself on 9/11.

LOL. This is exactly the kind of thinking I was talking about. This is what I call "legal industry" logic.

In fact, your entire post employs nothing but ad hominem attacks and false appeals to my motive. Nowhere do you attempt to rebut my central premise that law school fails to teach you anything yet still costs a fortune.

Also, you have little idea about either my desired or my actual outcome of the law school process, outside of the fact that I think the process itself is bullshit.

Maybe I went to law school in part for intellectual development purposes, and found that the stuff I did on my own time on the side was 50 times more educational and fulfilling than the time I spent in class. That's actually not very hard to believe. Virtually nobody that goes through the law school process thinks it's worth their time. It's not like I'm saying anything new here.

IMO this is a schtick perpetuated by lower-tier law students. Most top law schools have great clinics and practical programs. The lower ranked schools often teach more to the bar because their students struggle to pass it, but the idea that they produce "better prepared" lawyers is silly.